Creating Captions with MAGpie 1.0

The most difficult part of adding captions to rich media is accurately matching changes in the displayed text to changes in the audio and video. Fortunately, a tool called MAGpie is available to make this step easier. This tutorial details how to use MAGpie to create a caption file with the needed time codes.

Getting Started
Adding and Importing Text
The Basics
Output

Getting Started:

Open MAGpie (there should be an icon in the Start menu).
After the initial splash screen, you need to either open an existing project or start a new project. Assuming that this is the first time you have used MAGpie, select 'New Project' from the 'File' menu.
A dialog box appears, with three tabbed input areas.
- General -- this tab has input areas for the project name and any comments. It is worth taking the time to name the project.
- Media -- this tab allows you to browse to the media that needs captions, and to select the time units. If you know the number of frames per second of the media, select it here. Otherwise, leave it at 100.
- Stream -- this tab contains settings for the default formatting for the caption 'stream'. You can make and save modifications to this, but the default settings are intended to produce easy to read captions.
Click OK at the bottom of any of the tabbed areas to finish setup.
The MAGpie work area should be in view now. There are two windows -- the media window (playing in a Windows Media Player) and the stream window.
- Media window -- this window can be controlled using the buttons along the bottom of the window, or by keyboard commands.
  - F5 -- Pause
  - F6 -- Play
  - F7 -- Stop
  - F11 -- Jog backward, useful for precise location of shot changes
  - F12 -- jog forward, useful for precise location of shot changes
  - CTRL+SHIFT+F11 -- Jog backward by 5 seconds
  - CTRL+SHIFT+F12 -- Jog forward by 5 seconds
- Stream window -- this window contains the table where the captions and timecodes will be entered. There are spaces at the table header for copyright, title, and comments, but the information is only used for SAMI output. Underneath the table header, the Event area begins. The Events area contains 3 columns -- Timecodes, Speaker, and Caption.
  - Timecodes -- You can enter caption timecodes here, but MAGpie will do this part for you.
  - Speaker -- When the speaker can be identified, type the speaker's name here. The speaker's name will appear above the caption.
  - Caption -- This is where the caption text is entered. Warning! A limitation of the table where captions are entered is that if you have more than three lines in a cell, the application will misbehave.
  You can navigate through the cells of the table using the mouse or by using 'CTRL+arrow key'.

Adding and Importing Text:

The first major obstacle in the process is getting the caption text into the cells in the Captions column. It is possible to simply type the text into the cells, but if you have a transcript or a separate text file, you can import that as well. To import text, click on the 'Stream' menu and select 'Import text'. Next, you need to select the text file and the text will be imported. To make the text import as smooth as possible, read our page on pre-formatting text transcripts prior to importing into MAGpie.

When the text is imported, it will likely require some editing to make the captions flow smoothly. The Caption Center provides suggestions on captioning style that are useful when editing.

When adding text manually, MAGpie functions much like a word processor. One notable exception is that a single carriage return functions as a line break, leaving the cursor in the same cell, and a double carriage return will create a new row in the table.

The Basics:

The main purpose of MAGpie is to create timecodes in the text stream that match a point in the video. This is easy to accomplish. When you press the F9 key on the keyboard, a timecode is entered into the row where the cursor is currently located, and the cursor moves down one row.

To add timecodes for the entire video:

Put the cursor in the first row in the Events area of the table
Start the video (click play on the player or use F6)
At times in the video where you want the current caption to display, hit the F9 key
Stop the video when finished with the last caption, or let the video end on its own
Start the video again to proof the captioned video

You will encounter a few common situations:

A timecode is missing or incorrect.

Place your cursor in the row of the table containing the missing or incorrect timecode.
Move the video to a point before the time where the caption will appear.
Start the video.
Hit F9 on the keyboard to set the timecode.
Stop the video.
After moving to an earlier point in the video, restart the video to verify your change.

You want a caption to disappear after a few seconds, but there isn't a caption that follows soon after it. The general strategy is to create a caption that is blank and make that caption appear at the time when you want the caption before it to disappear.

Place the cursor on the row after the caption you want to disappear, click on the 'Event' menu, and select 'Insert event'.
A new row will appear in the table.
Add a timecode for the blank caption to correspond with the time you want the previous caption to clear.

A caption is too long for the screen. You can split the caption into two captions.

Place the cursor at the exact point in the caption where you want to break the caption into two.
Click on the 'Event' menu and select 'Split event'.
Add the timecode to one of the new rows.

Output:

Once you are satisfied with the captions in MAGpie, you can choose to output the results for SMIL (in RealPlayer), QuickTime, or SAMI (for Windows Media Player).

To output for one or more of these players, click on the 'Output' menu and choose your output.

SMIL -- saves a .smil file that will play the video with captions and a .rt (RealText) caption file.
QuickTime -- saves a .txt file that contains QTtext tags.
SAMI -- saves a .smi file.